Hello Group.I thought this might be a good place to list the classroom blogs that we are involved in.I guess I could start by adding a comment stating a bit about ourselves, and a link to our blog. Anyone have a better suggestion?
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Hello! I just joined this group - I am a high school math teacher and just learned about blogging and its use in the classroom. I plan to use it weekly, but I am a little timid/ nervous about it and if I will be able to be consistent with it. I was thinking of posting questions weekly that the students must respond to - or just having them reflect on the learning of that week. Then I would like them to respond to 3 other classmates' blogs. What do you think?
Hi Everyone
I first started a classroom blog when I began my own journey into the world of blogging in October 2006. At the start of this year. I began again using a different blogging platform- Room 3's Blog. After a couple of weeks I had a large number of students wanting to start their own blogs and now all my students (34 of them) have their own blogs. We started using them primarily as a sort of English portfolio (posting work they had done for class) but I'm now extending it to a range of posts. We are also trying to find more classes of students of a similar age (11 - 13 year olds) who are involved in blogging so that the students can become more involved in the real life of blogging by leaving and receiving comments.
Since their blogging world has become more active, this week I introduced them all to bloglines and they have now set up their own feeds to our class blog, comments from their own blogs and feeds from other student blogs they are interested.
I now have students entering school in the morning and immediately logging on to check boglines for comments and then busily replying to others or writing posts. Oh they are also keen on the 'bling' (widgets) that they can add to their sidebars.
I haven't had any problems with inappropriate comments etc but I did spend several sessions at the start of the year covering Internet safety and building up a set of class guidelines for blogging and using online services. Many of my students also have Bebo or MSN accounts which they use at home.
I teach English as a foreign language, I started blogging for my students in March. The idea is that they use their English outside the classroom. They’ve written comments but only one of them volunteered to write posts. I’m going to open another blog for them to post and I’m about to start a collaboration project with Jo.
They have never posted inappropriate comments. When we are in class they always try to speak in Spanish, but they never use Spanish in comments (of course I would not accept them), and they always use English when they send me an email. I really don’t know why this happens. http://takeitfurther.blogspot.com/
TAKE IT FURTHER
A blog for students of English ....................................... LEAP OFF YOUR COURSE BOOKS!
Lisa Parisi > Gabriela SellartAugust 13, 2007 at 5:56pm
Hi Jennifer. We just started our blog last spring so blogging is fairly new to us too. However, the children took to it quickly and, I guess, so did we (my co-teacher and I). We always assigned blogs based on lessons in class...book discussions, lesson summaries, etc....but the children were also encouraged to blog about anything they wanted. We checked all blogs for appropriateness. We found some students blogged constantly and some just blogged for the assignments. But they all loved going to other blogsites and commenting. We had them comment to a "friend" we met through Classblogmeister so we could be sure the comments were kind. So what started as a test became an integral part of each lesson, each day.
Hiya! I"m a Special Education Teacher in a 5th Grade Inclusion Classroom. This September, I'll also be going back to college. I'm pursing a 2nd Masters in Educational Technology through a collaborative effort between my school district and a local college.
Darren Draper > Christine SouthardJuly 31, 2007 at 1:11am
Good luck with your second Master's degree. One Master's was enough for me!
I'm very interested in how your students react to blogging. I've worked with ESL classes in blogging, but never Special Ed classes. Do you find that your students are able to blog well? Do they enjoy it? Is it something they could do on their own, even, if you wanted to assign a post as homework?
I work in a 5th grade inclusion class and the majority of our students like blogging. They like sharing their ideas online. As with all students, especially elementary students, editing was a little bit of an issue. We, my co-teacher & I, taught the students to copy & paste their entries into Microsoft Word to edit their pieces for spelling/grammar. We also encouraged them to read aloud their pieces before publishing. They, sometimes, applied these skills to blogging in class & at home when they had blogging homework.
However, with classblogmeister, teachers have editing capabilities and the ability to leave notes for the students before posting their blogs. We used these applications frequently when student spelling/grammar was way off, and we left them notes when their entries lost focus. This was a great tool for us because whether you're classified or not, sometimes we all need a little redirection.
Developmentally, learning to edit takes time and we found that when we left the minor mistakes, students often went back at a later time and edited their pieces, surprised by their errors.
Lisa Parisi > Christine SouthardAugust 13, 2007 at 5:51pm
Hi. I am the regular ed teacher in this collaborative with Christine Southard. One great key for improving writing skills was the ClustrMap on the blogsite. We would look at it in class frequently, showing the children how it was growing and pointing out that our audience was worldwide and vast. The children would often point out to us errors they found in other class' blogs. We would remind them that these other children were probably saying the same things about them and that's why they should work to edit carefully.
As for posting homework, we often assigned blogs for homework but checked carefully before approving. Some students needed assistance in class before their finished blogs went out but most were able to be successful on their own.
The students LOVED blogging. In fact, today, August 13, I approved three blogs from a student who struggled with writing skills all year. During her summer vacation, she is blogging. What more could we ask for?
Hi, I blog with three classes at a secondary school in Australia. My Year 7s are blogging off the main blog site: you can access their blogs through http://mrsmac2022.learnerblogs.org and my year 9s are blogging at http://jomcleay.com/year9 Please come and visit and add some comments if you like. The comments seems to be the lifeblood of blogging in the classroom.
Jo, I'm impressed with your work and the work contributed by your students. Have you had any issues with students posting inappropriate material? If so, what did you do to fix the problem?
Replies
I first started a classroom blog when I began my own journey into the world of blogging in October 2006. At the start of this year. I began again using a different blogging platform- Room 3's Blog. After a couple of weeks I had a large number of students wanting to start their own blogs and now all my students (34 of them) have their own blogs. We started using them primarily as a sort of English portfolio (posting work they had done for class) but I'm now extending it to a range of posts. We are also trying to find more classes of students of a similar age (11 - 13 year olds) who are involved in blogging so that the students can become more involved in the real life of blogging by leaving and receiving comments.
Since their blogging world has become more active, this week I introduced them all to bloglines and they have now set up their own feeds to our class blog, comments from their own blogs and feeds from other student blogs they are interested.
I now have students entering school in the morning and immediately logging on to check boglines for comments and then busily replying to others or writing posts. Oh they are also keen on the 'bling' (widgets) that they can add to their sidebars.
I haven't had any problems with inappropriate comments etc but I did spend several sessions at the start of the year covering Internet safety and building up a set of class guidelines for blogging and using online services. Many of my students also have Bebo or MSN accounts which they use at home.
They have never posted inappropriate comments. When we are in class they always try to speak in Spanish, but they never use Spanish in comments (of course I would not accept them), and they always use English when they send me an email. I really don’t know why this happens.
http://takeitfurther.blogspot.com/
Our class blog site is:
http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=88116
I'm very interested in how your students react to blogging. I've worked with ESL classes in blogging, but never Special Ed classes. Do you find that your students are able to blog well? Do they enjoy it? Is it something they could do on their own, even, if you wanted to assign a post as homework?
However, with classblogmeister, teachers have editing capabilities and the ability to leave notes for the students before posting their blogs. We used these applications frequently when student spelling/grammar was way off, and we left them notes when their entries lost focus. This was a great tool for us because whether you're classified or not, sometimes we all need a little redirection.
Developmentally, learning to edit takes time and we found that when we left the minor mistakes, students often went back at a later time and edited their pieces, surprised by their errors.
As for posting homework, we often assigned blogs for homework but checked carefully before approving. Some students needed assistance in class before their finished blogs went out but most were able to be successful on their own.
The students LOVED blogging. In fact, today, August 13, I approved three blogs from a student who struggled with writing skills all year. During her summer vacation, she is blogging. What more could we ask for?
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